Nokia Lumia 900 Smartphone Review

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Introduction and Specifications

Windows Phone is only about a year and a half old in the market at this point but Nokia has a much longer lineage. In the past 12 months though, their two worlds have collided in a fashion that will have repercussions for quite some time to come, with Nokia CEO Stephen Elop firmly committed to focusing his company's turnaround on what Microsoft is cooking up in Redmond for handsets. It has been, and will continue to be, a long shot. Nokia's smartphone market share in America has eroded so severely that many consumers have assumed that Nokia has pulled out of this market entirely, ceding ground to Apple and the myriad companies that have backed Google's Android platform.

But the Lumia 900 represents something important for both Microsoft and Nokia: hope. The first wave of Windows Phone handsets were interesting to the hardcore tech followers, but few mainstream consumers seemed to care. By all accounts, Windows Phone 7 wasn't really ready for prime time. It was launched in time for a holiday shopping season, but it lacked the polish of iOS and Android. At launch, there was no support for threaded e-mail, no support for multiple calendars, no integrated Twitter support, and the list goes on.

But the Lumia 900 is shipping with Windows Phone 7.5, codenamed Mango. It's a far, far more robust OS. Windows Phone has matured mightily in the past 18 months, and this phone benefits greatly from that maturity. Let's look at the specifications.

You may notice that the Lumia 900 doesn't quite measure up to other superphones in the market in terms of its specifications. But there's a good reason for that. Microsoft's hardware specifications surrounding Windows Phone are rather strict, and they haven't been updated recently. There's a software limit of 800 x 480 for a screen resolution (developers are OK this; consumers looking for a qHD display are not). There's also no support for dual-core and quad-core chips just yet. But Windows Phone is a streamlined OS that doesn't necessarily need a cutting edge SoC to perform well.